Making Sense with Sam Harris - #246 — Police Training & Police Misconduct

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Rener Gracie about police procedure and about the special relevance of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for safely controlling resisting suspects. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well today is yet another PSA, this time on the topic of police violence and the relevance of jiu-jitsu training to mitigating some of the problems there. Today I'm speaking with Henner Gracie. And Henner, if you don't recognize the name, is a third-generation member of the legendary Gracie family that is credited with creating Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, in large measure, and passing it down through now three generations, where Henner and his brother Hieron are some of the best teachers on the planet. And they have focused in recent years on teaching police officers the skills they need

to apprehend and control suspects without significantly injuring them. And jiu-jitsu, as you'll hear, is uniquely good for this. And this training is being made available to police departments all over the country. And Henner and Heron are at the forefront of this. They're not the only people doing it, but they are amazingly effective at what they do. As you'll hear, this conversation is a true PSA and almost an infomercial for this kind of training. And that's not an accident. We're at a moment now in the public perception of policing that is nothing short of calamitous. As I record this, we're getting to the end of the Derek Chauvin trial. It's, of course,

not yet clear what the verdict will be there. As you'll hear, Henner and I are both quite clear in leaving aside the Chauvin case for the purposes of today's discussion. It is certainly not an example of pervasive misunderstanding of police procedure. I think anyone who saw the killing of George Floyd recognized that we were witnessing a shocking instance of police misconduct, and at just what level, a jury will soon decide. But for instance, in recent days, since I recorded this conversation with Henner, there's been the case of Daunte Wright, a motorist who was shot and killed by a police officer in Minnesota. And as if you've seen the video, it's about as clear as it can be that the police officer, Kimberly Ann Potter, thought she

was drawing her taser when she was in fact drawing her firearm. And when she shot Dante Wright, she was horrified to discover that she had her gun in hand. As you'll hear, this is relevant because the police reliance on tasers is not without significant risk. In this case, risk of the extremely negative outcome of drawing your firearm by accident. But the overall picture here is that our police officers are shockingly ill-equipped to deal with the challenges they face. So when members of the general public believe they're witnessing the murderous sadism and racism of an oppressive police force, in many cases, that's not at all what's on display. What we're seeing are people who are poorly trained and very much in over their heads once things turn violent.

And I really don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the pervasive misunderstanding of what's happening here is tearing our country apart. So in the hopes of doing some small thing to help rectify that, I wanted to have a full discussion with Henner on this point, of just what it takes for a police officer to arrest someone who is resisting arrest. So Henner and I break that down here, and we talk about the kind of training that should be available more and more to police officers. And there are a few people who are working harder to make that happen

than Henner and his brother Huron. They are the chief instructors at Gracie University, which is a global jiu-jitsu organization that's headquartered in Southern California. They have over 180 brick-and-mortar locations worldwide affiliated with them, and over 300,000 students learning online at gracieuniversity.com. And they have over 20 years of experience teaching law enforcement professionals. And we talk about some of the recent successes here, which hopefully will be a sign of things to come. And now without further delay, I bring you Henner Gracie. I am here with Henner Gracie. Henner, thanks for joining me. Sir, how are you, man? My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And yeah, how's it going? Yes, I was telling my producer, Stacey, that

this is the marriage of one of the lower energy voices on earth, my own, and one of the higher energy voices on earth, yours. And so I'm going to have to snort cocaine over here or do something to bridge the distance between us, or you're going to have to slow it down. Yeah, I'm going to have to snort cocaine over here or do something to bridge the distance between us, or you're going to have to slow it down. Yeah, I think it'll create the, or it's a perfect marriage and all your listeners and fans will be in for a delightful, perfectly balanced conversation about the state of law enforcement, jujitsu, and whatever else you want to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. So let's set this up properly. So first, I've spoken about self-defense and martial arts and jujitsu in various places on the podcast before, but you contacted me because

many of us are seeing kind of troubling signs in police behavior and training and ideas about what should be legal and illegal in terms of the escalation of force procedure on the side of the cops. And there's just so much confusion about what is going on in the world with respect to the cops and violence, both warranted and unwarranted. And so you do a lot of training, you and your brother, Hiron, who's been my main jiu-jitsu teacher, do a lot of training with the police. And so we really want to jump into that and talk about it. And it's obviously an incredibly timely conversation, given that we are now recording this during the trial of Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd. And so there's a lot to say there. But before we jump into police procedure and violence per se, let's just talk about jiu-jitsu and grappling generically and

introduce us to how you come to know so much about this. I'll just set it up by saying that you and your brother are part of the Grac Gracie family which is this uh you know legendary isn't isn't too strong a word family in the martial arts community and you can talk briefly about the the history there but I just want to say that the conversation we're going to have here is not really adequate to the topic if people don't then go look at some of the video that we might reference of you guys training cops and you really teaching anything on the mat. I mean, the two of you are two of the most gifted teachers of anything I've ever come across. So people really will link to some videos that will be relevant on my website where we embed this podcast. But this is an audio document that really requires some visual aids in the end.

So I just want to say that as a preamble. And perhaps you can just briefly talk about the history of jiu-jitsu and how you come to be talking about this. I appreciate it. And I always appreciate the opportunity to share, you know, the, the, the really my family's legacy of self-defense and martial arts with a new audience. So thank you, Sam, for having me on and, and for your dedication to this amazing martial art for so many years. And yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's wise of you to kind of give some framework for, for the listeners to understand what's going on here, because you, as someone who practices the art, it's as what we're going to talk about today is

as common sense and logical in terms of the major advancements that have been made in the recent months and years in law enforcement training as a result of jujitsu. For you, it's absolutely makes sense because you have all that kind of that frame that is that frame as a practitioner of the art. But for listeners who do not have a history or even knowledge of jujitsu and maybe the exposure because it's such a pop culture phenomenon now is mixed martial arts. Maybe your exposure is literally hearing about a UFC title fight and a technique or an arm bar or a neck restraint or a chokehold being used. That might be someone's exposure. So understanding that that's the case, I can give a brief breakdown of the family history and how we got into jujitsu and what it was intended for, and then how, when the time

comes, how that translates perfectly into the use of force in law enforcement today, which we're absolutely involved in for the last 25 plus years. So the Gracie family, my grandfather, Elio Gracie, was the co-creator of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. They learned it from his brother, Carlos, who learned from Japanese men in Brazil. This is in the early 1900s. And eventually, when my grandfather started practicing, he had difficulties with the Japanese rendition of the art because he was a very small, very frail, very weak young man as a teenager. So because of his physical frailties, he had no choice but to modify the techniques over several years to adapt his frail physique. And those adaptations to the Japanese predecessor are what gave birth to what is known today as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, depending who you're learning it from. And, you know, that happened in Brazil in the early 1900s.

And to test the efficacy of these techniques, my grandfather started engaging in challenge matches, fights with other representatives of other martial arts. Think mixed martial arts, but before it was called that. These are just, you know, no rules fights between two masters of their crafts, really from a scientific perspective to understand what works and what doesn't. That happened in Brazil for decades. And my grandfather, you know, fought all comers and so did some of his brothers. So these are Gracie challenge matches started in Brazil. And then my father brought the art to America in 1978, got established in his garage here in Southern California, in Hermosa Beach, and continued teaching at his garage and also having these challenge matches in the garage where, you know, he would meet a karate master through a student of his in the

garage, was introduced to a karate master or a taekwondo master. And then these challenge matches would happen between two arts. And there was really no rules. It was, listen, you do you, I do me. When you're knocked out or passed out or tap out, we stop. Until then, we keep fighting. And again, these were professionals really believing in their crafts, going there, and invariably, these representatives of these other disciplines would get submitted and neutralized very quickly, minutes, sometimes less than a minute. And it was almost unbelievable to them how effective jujitsu was. And the reason why jujitsu was so effective, if I had to summarize it in a nutshell, why jujitsu is so good is because where other martial arts rely on speed, strength, power,

and explosiveness and surprise attack and violence in that manner, jujitsu, above everything else, violates the distance from which traditional fights are fought, right? Rather than standing toe-to-toe and swinging to see who knocks the other person out, jiu-jitsu aims to close the distance, control the subject, take the person to the ground or surface where their strikes no longer have power because they don't have their feet planted and the proper distance to deliver that strike. They're now on their ground flailing, don't know what to do. And then the jujitsu person who's more comfortable in that grappling distance controls them until they exhaust. And invariably the opponent or the untrained adversary, the non-jujitsu opponent in that case, will make a mistake by exposing a limb or a neck,

a joint of some sort. And then the jujitsu practitioner will use leverage, not strength, but leverage, full body mechanics to isolate one of the limbs or neck of the subject and then the jiu-jitsu practitioner will use leverage, not strength, but leverage, full-body mechanics to isolate one of the limbs or neck of the subject and then apply a submission that will render them into submission. At that point, they have no choice but to tap out or suffer extreme bodily harm if the pressure were to be applied to its max capacity or capability, which 99 times out of 100 isn't necessary because the jujitsu trained expert there knows that they have full control. They get compliance or they get cooperation, or in this case, a tap out during a challenge match and the fight's over. And in many cases, it's, you know, and you see these, these are videos are online. If you look up Gracie challenge matches,

they're on YouTube from the garage days, from random colleges and dojos. And that's kind of how the West was won. And then my father and his partner, Art Davey, were the co-creators for the UFC. And that's where the whole thing took another form because it was basically using the UFC, using television as a platform to make these challenge matches seen to the world so that everyone around the world could say,

wow, how is karate going to do against boxing, against sumo, against judo, against kickboxing, against jujitsu? Like what's going to happen? And no one believed it was possible. They made it happen. It was more successful than they imagined. And today, you know, fast forward several owners, right? My father sold his interest after the first, I think, five installments. And then at that point, it changed hands a couple times to the Fertitta brothers, who then got a hold of it. And with Dana White's help, made it a, you know, a spectator sport on regular television, made it a sanctioned sport, and then it blew up, and

today everyone knows jiu-jitsu kind of in that lens. But I think the important part for this discussion is that the people at the core of jiu-jitsu, right, the Gracie family and, you know, people that we've taught and other instructors who've made this their life, know that above everything else, jiu-jitsu is the art that gives a smaller, less physically fit, powerful, less athletic person the ability to defend themselves and control and overcome a larger, more athletic person by way of distance management, by way of alavanca or leverage, and by way of energy efficiency. And through those processes, control someone in a relatively nonviolent manner, neutralize them, exhaust their energy, and then ultimately win the fight

with a leverage-based joint lock or chokehold. And that's what makes this art so special. It's truly the leveler of the playing field for smaller, weaker individuals, which is why it's taken just such a rapid, you know, escalation of popularity here with the assistance of the UFC. It's now becoming the martial art to learn as an adult or as a child, right? Where historically, you know, karate and taekwondo were more associated with children, right? Developing confidence and discipline. More

historically, you'd see that association. And as someone got older, they would stop doing taekwondo or karate. Well, with jujitsu, it's the opposite, right? You're a living proof of that. And every other person who's just a lifelong fan and practitioner of the art, it's so engaging. It's so effective. It's so reliable. And ultimately, it allows people to neutralize violence without violence. And that's what I think has such pertinence to today's discussion regarding law enforcement.

Yeah, I just want to pick up on a couple of points there. One is just for those who are not fans of mixed martial arts and don't really know the significance of what happened in the UFC, in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which was 1993, right? It was the first one? Yeah, November 12, 1993. Yeah, so your father, Horian, launched that, and it's become this major sport, which is great. But we should recall that it really was, in the beginning and for the longest time, remained a virtual science experiment to discover which martial art was the best, really. I mean, it's like, under conditions of minimal rules, I mean, there are now more rules than there were back in

the day, but, you know, virtually no rules apart from eye gouging. I mean, you could even, if memory serves, you could even strike to the groin in some of those first competitions, or at least people did. I mean, it was just, it was as close to a street fight in a ring as anyone had ever seen. And there were no weight classes and no time limits, right? And if I add, it was a single elimination, eight or 16 man tournament in the same night. So you had to fight three times to win in the same night with no time limits. Yeah. It's like the movie, The Game of Death, where Bruce Lee has to fight someone on every floor. If you're going to win that thing, you have to just keep advancing through opponents. And so your uncle, Hoyce Gracie, won to the astonishment of virtually everyone who didn't

astonishment of virtually everyone who didn't understand what was likely to happen here, the dominance that he showed in those initial bouts over people who were, you know, obviously bigger and stronger and obviously thought they were going to crush him. And the fact that he did it all by, as you say, closing the distance and, you know, essentially strangling people. It was mystifying and it created a total reset of the thinking around martial arts and martial arts competition. And since things have moved on, I mean, the primacy of jiu-jitsu is less noticeable now because people from every discipline, whether they start out as a college wrestler or even just a stand-up striker, if they're going to get into mixed martial arts, they're going to learn a lot of jiu-jitsu, whether they call it that or not, because it is

the necessary foundation for grappling and certainly submission in the sport now. So we shouldn't give the false sense that jujitsu is all a person needs to know now to succeed in mixed martial arts. Obviously, there's a lot of striking and specialization in that space, but it has unique relevance to the topic at hand, which is so much a matter of understanding how to control people. When you're talking about the tools that are available to police officers to, with a minimal amount of violence, arrest somebody who they've decided to arrest, the tools they have are quite limited, and there's certainly no tool that is better than being a true expert in how to physically control people without inflicting lasting injury on them. And if you don't know jujitsu, if you don't know, you know, call it grappling more generically,

if you're not an expert grappler, and there's so many videos that attest to how poorly trained most cops are in this space, you resort to the use of other tools that are synonymous with inflicting lasting injury on a subject. So the moment you take out a baton and start cracking someone over the head with it, right? That is going to work by a principle that is synonymous with neurological injury. We can transition to talking about cops here, but I guess there's two sides of this that are very interesting to me. There's what the cops are trained to do and should be trained to do and how they can play their game more or less impeccably, but then there's also the immense amount of confusion

people have over the significance of how the people getting arrested can behave or misbehave. When I see videos of these botched arrests, you know, where cops use or, you know, for one reason or another provoke to using, you know, inordinate violence, so often I'm seeing people resisting arrest in obviously dangerous ways, obviously provocative ways, obviously doing things with their hands that, you know, in another context, a cop has to expect is an effort to produce a weapon to kill them. And these things are going off the rails because so many people just do not understand the cop's eye view of this encounter.

So I think we should talk about both sides of this, but that's just to set you off and run in the direction of what cops should and should not be doing here. So we have to start by clarifying some of the misunderstandings around police training. Because what we have today at the core, what we have right now is an incredible level of disappointment, like an unmatched level of disappointment from the general public on police performance when it comes to use of force, right? It's fair to say that there's just, it's never been such a high degree or such a large gap between what level of force the police

officers are using and what the general public believes the police officers should be using. Okay. And I want to kind of start with that position that that that's the gap, right? The police disappointment gap, I call it the PD gap. And that gap is larger than it's ever been. I want to talk about how we got to that point and where we actually started. So the most shocking information I give people when I talk about this subject is the fact that the average police officer in California, okay, and other states, some more, some less, but on average, in California, receives four hours of control, arrest and control training every two years. Now, just to be clear, arrest and control includes jujitsu type grappling, restraint devices, cuffing, right? It includes use of force policy, law. So they have to have the refresher on what

the law is regarding use of force and certain case studies that they kind of revert to when they talk about use of force and law enforcement. So in four hours, it's not uncommon, and this is not me guessing. This is the actual trainers here at local California agencies telling me this. They say, Henner, in four hours, it's not uncommon that only one of those hours at most is physical control tactics that the officer can use when they're taking someone down and controlling them in a violent resisting of arrest situation. Right? means basically two hours a year, but you split those four hours up and there's only an hour of grappling, which gives you an average of 30 minutes potentially of grappling jujitsu type training annually for an officer. It gives some framework to what we're dealing with here. So when I see the state of the country right now, and people are like pissed that cops are using too much force and

defund the police, there's a lot of things going on there. I'm torn because I'm going, I don't think the general public knows how little training we're talking about them starting with. And then, so then the question, when you see an excessive use of force, it's for one of two reasons. It could either be the cop was incredibly well-trained and they're abusing their power deliberately, right? For any number of reasons, they're flex-trained and they're abusing their power deliberately, right? For any number of reasons, they're flexing their power and they're going above and beyond, and they just want to show how they can hurt people and they go and they do it. There's another possibility here though, that the cop is so disastrously under-trained,

the actual end-user street cops are so disastrously under-trained that when they enter into these violent, incredibly intense, life-threatening altercations, even when there is no weapon present from the subject, there's always a weapon on the officer's hip. So every engagement is a life or death engagement when there's a gun on the officer's hip that can be taken from them, which is not uncommon. So when they're in these life and death physical altercations or arrest scenarios, and this is your expertise, socations or arrest scenarios, and this is your expertise, so you can correct me here, and they experience the amygdala hijack, right?

Where their survival response takes over because they're so under-trained that they do not know how to handle the situation. And as a result, when the amygdala hijack happens and they lose prefrontal cortex control, now all of their decisions are fight or flight or freeze or survival mode, fear-based responses that are really automatic and they don't have much of a choice in the matter. They're no longer themselves. And the level of force they use at that point, it's a complete toss in the air of what's going to happen. Nobody really knows. And that's why we get so many uses of force that are so disastrous. So the point I'm making is that my experience and every single time, Sam, that I go to a GST, Gracie Survival Tactics, is our law enforcement week-long 40-hour certification

course where these cops learn the Gracie tactics and they become trainers that then go back to their agencies and teach their colleagues. The problem is in those courses, we teach them for a whole week and they learn a ridiculous amount of information and they become proficient when they test out of that course. When they go home and the California agency, the chief says, yes, you can train our officers. They call them in-service officers, the ones that are the street cops. You can do an in-service class for four hours. And out of those four hours, this every two years, you can teach one hour of GST. So the fact that we're teaching the cops great techniques that are nonviolent is really insignificant because when they go home and teach it one hour every

two years, really on average or less, there's no recall capability. There's no reflex development in that amount of time. I have students that train one hour a week, two hours a week, and they're still white belts after a year who could finally put this stuff together. So the level of under trainingtraining cannot be overstated. And the fact that we train instructors at a high level, but they go back and get blocked by the state-mandated requirements is where this entire thing falls flat on its face. So GST has great of a course that it's been. And as much as a great review we get from the students that we teach, those are the instructors. So they go back and teach these end users and everything falls apart.

And I would go so far to say that based on my knowledge, because I ask them, Sam, every class we survey them. And I ask, how many hours on average annually do your in-service officers get at your agency? And I'm in the room with 100 officers from sometimes 50 to 80 agencies, right? Two or three cops from a different agency. So I'm teaching a massive room full of people of all these instructors. And the average answer is four to eight hours a year. But that includes all those other things that we're talking about, right? Some other states have more, some states have less, but all of them know that even if it were eight hours, Sam, and it was all eight hours were GST techniques, it would not be enough. Yeah. Not even close. Not even close. And my recommendation for the country is it has to be at least one hour a week of jujitsu practice, right? Preferably jujitsu

adapted for law enforcement scenarios because it is different. You know that like when there's a gun involved and this person can grab your gun, you got to do the Americana arm lock is different when someone's reaching for your gun. But the point is, I would go so far to say, and I've said this publicly already, that based on what information I know about how under-trained the end users are, which is not public knowledge, right? People typically don't, they think they're trained like Navy SEALs, which is why you get such a high degree of disappointment. Because if they were trained like Navy SEALs, where they trained six months for a eight-week deployment, if they were trained like Navy SEALs, we wouldn't see this level of poor performance and bad judgment. But I'd go so far to say, and I have, that police officers in America are the most under-trained professionals in the country. There is no profession in America

where we ask the professional to do more with less training invested in them than when we ask a police officer, which is a regular human being like you or I or any other person off the street, we ask a regular human being to arrest a violently resistant and in many cases, assaultive subject with four hours, let's just call it, of training every year or two. You're not, you couldn't create a worse scenario for someone asked to do a harder job. Yeah, I'll simply add, I don't actually know the exact numbers, but I know that the story with respect to firearms training isn't much rosier. I mean, the assumption is that cops are very well trained with guns and have all the scenario training that tunes their intuitions with respect to when to draw a

gun and when to fire it. And it's just amazing how little effective firearms training cops have. 664 hours, Sam, is the state mandated requirement of training by California Post, peace officer standard of training, to be a police officer in California. Every state has its own. In California, it's 664 hours to become a cop. Just for comparison, it's 1,600 hours to become a cosmetologist and 1,500 hours to become a barber. So both of those require more than double the training that it takes to become a police officer in the United States of America, California state of the United States. And every other state has slight deviations from that. But the point is, to your point, that includes firearms, that includes hand-to-hand combat,

that includes arrest and control, that includes legal policy and everything else in between. So even on a macro level, what it takes to become a cop, I was talking more on the micro annual arrest and control four hours a year. On the macro level, we're setting these cops up for disasters because you're taking a regular human who in many cases has never been in a fight in their life. You're giving them 664 hours of training that include everything under the sun, but not nearly enough of everything, right? So they learn a little bit about everything, but they're masters of nothing. And then you give them a gun and a badge and say, go enforce the law. And they think that because they have a gun,

that people are going to listen to them. So the moment that someone says, I'm not going to jail, spits on the cop and starts walking away. And now you're asking this regular human who played high school, graduated high school, played video games every day, all day, four hours a day, got to go in and join the police department and became a police officer. Not all of them, but I'm just saying this is possible, right? You're getting a kid who's never played a sport, never been in a fight in his life or her, and now is being asked to arrest a violent person without any substantial training in the skill, right? The grappling and or jiu-jitsu skill set

that will allow them to do that in a way that A, protects themselves, right? First and foremost, protect the officer, but secondarily and very importantly, protects the subject in the process. So because, listen, the amygdala hijack happens, as you know, when there's an actual or perceived loss of

control. And in law enforcement, a high-stress law enforcement situation where someone resists arrest, an officer can very quickly go into the mental framework of, oh my gosh, I can't control them. They're not listening to me. They get very quickly elevated anxiety. And soon they're in the amygdala hijack. And now it's fight or flight.

And now they're going to quickly resort to their pepper spray, taser, baton, or any firearm, worst case scenario, in very rapid succession. What jujitsu does. Look at you or me, Sam, for example, who've invested years in a skill set that allows us to be in close quarters with someone, control them against their will, and do so without hurting them or ourselves. Think about how we would respond in a situation where there's an officer or sorry, a suspect who's behaving erratically and violently and not cooperating. And we decide we have to take this person down. We have so many options before this situation becomes deadly because we've invested in the skillset and we're confident. And as a result of that confidence, the perception of loss of control comes much later.

It requires much more violence and chaos for you or I to perceive the loss of control than for an officer who does not know how to control a violent subject with their bare hands. That's what we're fighting for. We're fighting to get more training for officers because when I see these videos go viral and people are so quickly to judge it as an abusive use of power by the police officer. And just because it's on topic, the Derek Chauvin case, I'm not referring to that, right? To me, that was an abusive use of power. in my case, I would not classify that as, oh, he's under-trained, therefore he over-utilized his force.

He had the guy cuffed prone. There was not really any threat to him or other officers and he kept the knee on the neck for far too long. And the anatomy of how that affected his blood flow, we can discuss later if you want. But the point is, I'm not speaking about that. I'm talking about the 99% of other videos where it just gets out of hand crazy. And the cop escalates force unreasonably to the public who see it on video.

And everyone goes, man, that cop abused, used their deadly force, used their taser way too soon. What I'm speculating and what I feel is often the case is you have a good person who's doing the job for the right reason. But even the best cop, the best character, moral character, best values, the best cop on the planet, let's just say, the second they're in a situation that they are not prepared to handle non-violently, they're gonna handle it violently. Yeah. Well, not only that, they have a duty to handle it violently, because I want to come back to that one detail you brought into play here. When you're dealing with a cop, there's always a gun on the table.

This is something that people just simply do not have intuitions about. So when you see some of these videos where someone starts resisting arrest and they start, you know, pushing a cop or, you know, grabbing, you know, the cop tries to restrain someone, tries to start cuffing someone, they start resisting, they start pushing back, it becomes a grappling match, or, you know, the guy's girlfriend runs up and grabs the cop to stop him from trying to cuff the boyfriend or whatever it is. Whenever you put your hands on a cop, this, in the cop's mind, very, very quickly has to be perceived as a fight for his or her gun. That's what will happen if you overpower the cop. In the cop's universe, that is an absolutely bright line that cannot be crossed. And yet, in the

thinking of so many people who just think they shouldn't be arrested for whatever reason, it just seems like fair play. You know, it's like, if the cop pushes me, I can push him back, I can grab him, I can punch him. You know, it's like, it's completely inappropriate for a cop at that point to draw his gun and shoot somebody. But the cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you knock him out, right? He has to assume the worst at what you're going to do to him and to the rest of the public that he or she's pledged to protect. And so the presence of the cop's firearm changes everything. And then there's the additional fact that people have terrible intuitions for what is truly threatening from the cop's point of view with respect to what a person can be doing with their

hands. I mean, it's just the moment someone sticks their hands in the pocket of their hoodie, or they turn around and grab something off the front seat of their car, and they're not following directions, the moment your hands go out of sight, that is a five-alarm fire from the cop's point of view. And it has to be because every cop knows of the case where a half a second later, that hand that just disappeared is now holding a gun and it's shooting a cop in the face, right? And all of those videos exist. Virtually 99% of people are unable to rationally interpret what they see when they see these videos of arrests going haywire. Yeah, I really like that, Sam. And I think that it's a very valid point, 100%.

And you kind of touched on two. One of them was the cop has a gun on his hip and the likelihood of that gun being taken from him or her during the altercation is so real that the cop cannot get knocked out. It has to be, in the cop's mind, it has to be impossible that they allow a knockout. So they're willing to do anything to prevent that. And the other one is letting the suspect's hands, you know, be out of sight and kind of splitting those two apart. Regarding the cop having the gun on their hip and the risk that that presents in every situation. I agree. And I think that people are completely oblivious to those realities because cops understand and have seen all the videos and have done all the research and have, you know, have had the training to,

and be, and have ultimately been told, right. That, yo, if you get knocked out, they could take your gun, they can shoot you with it. So the cop knows that, but the general public doesn't know that. So they think they can, you know, rustle and tussle and just kind of grab and push or, and be aggressive with an officer, not knowing that the officer can't play that game because of the risks that await them because the stories have happened. But what I will say is that the chance of Henner, if I was a police officer and I'm not a great example because people are going to say, oh, you're a black belt, you've been doing this your whole life, but let's just, any version of me, let's call the blue belt

henner, let's call the white belt with four stripes henner, or yourself, right, as a blue belt. That the chance of someone in a ground fight taking a gun from you or I is significantly lower than taking a gun from a cop who has no ground control and no comfort in that close quarter situation. So even though what you're saying is true, that the people have to understand, what I'm saying is, listen, we can only control so much what the world thinks of law enforcement. We can only, you know, it's like regarding bullying, right? Parents go, yeah, well, kids shouldn't bully. I go, well, yeah, you can't control what bullies do, but you can control the preparation you give your child so that when they go to school, if they're bully-proof with jujitsu,

they can put up a barrier and they can behave in a different way. So what I'm saying is I agree that there's a huge problem regarding the public's perception of understanding the reality surrounding law enforcement and the uses of force that they have to go through. They're not professionals. They don't know, right? They just don't know, right? But what I can say is that an officer is exponentially less likely to have to resort to deadly force when the feeling of threat against the officer is reduced by the increased training that they invest in. So the more trained an officer is, the less likely that their gun be taken from them or that they be knocked out. A simple example happened in Kansas City a few years back. We did a Gracie breakdown on this. You may link to it. Officer Donald Hubbard, Kansas City police

officer, Officer Donald Hubbard, you know, approached a scene where there had been a man who attacked a cab driver. And the man attacked a cab driver, was pissed off and was drunk, punched him. Officer Hubbard shows up, tries to take the man down. And in doing so, tries to control, puts him on the ground, puts a knee on his back, like on his torso. And then Officer Hubbard ends up on his back. Now you have Anthony Bruno was the suspect's name. Anthony Bruno was on top of Mr. Hubbard

and was hitting him in the face. Like imagine a side control position, Sam, like, you know, bottom of side control, like kneeling next to you and then hammer fisting you in the face and like scratching you. That's kind of what it was. So he was just kneeling on the ground over the top of Officer Hubbard, punching, scratching.

Officer Hubbard on his back had no clue what to do, draws his firearm, fires one round, and kills the suspect from the bottom of the fight, shooting upward into his torso. The suspect was off-duty firefighter Anthony Bruno. On his wedding night, was drunk, had a debate with the cab driver, and got killed at the hands of a police officer from the same Kansas City. And therein lies the tragedy. Where when I look at that situation, right, because that officer

Hubbard wasn't wrong in his use of force because his life was in danger. But the danger to his life was a function of the four hours every year or two that he receives in ground fighting to where he did not know how to recuperate guard, use his legs to manage the distance, neutralize the strikes that were reaching his face. Had he known how to do any one of those skills, right? He would not have had his life in danger.

And therefore he could have waited there, waited for help to arrive just by holding a position of guard in punch block series stage one, as we learn as a beginner here in your first five classes, you would learn that. If he were just to hold that position, he would have retained his firearm. He would have not had to use deadly force, but that requires the training. And I don't even blame the officer, Sam. I blame the department who ultimately is at the mercy of the state because the state sets the annual training

requirements and chiefs don't like to operate out of bounds. They typically will stay within the state's requirement and say, if four hours is what the state prescribes, that's what we're going to do for every in-service officer every year. So everyone ultimately is a victim of the state. And there's not really a federal law enforcement requirement. It really is state by state. And then within the state requirements, the agencies have the right to do more or less, but generally they try to stick within the state's requirements just to be safe.

So who's to blame in the fact that Officer Hubbard had to shoot off duty firefighter Anthony Bruno because Officer Hubbard reached an amygdala hijack, a perceived loss of control. Well, really actual, I guess, in his case, because he did not know what to do. An actual loss of control in a violent altercation, and had to use deadly force because had he got knocked unconscious, for all he knows, the suspect could have used the gun against him.

Whether he did or whether he would or would not have, we don't ever know, but they have to presume that that is going to be the case. So this is what we're dealing with. So he shoots that, he shoots officer, he shoots the firefighter, Anthony Bruno, and then people could look and say, oh man, why did he shoot him? He should have just done X, Y, or Z. And my point is, you don't have a choice to use techniques you never learned. And that's where the whole system is failing these officers. We're putting them in situations to expecting much more from them than what we're giving them the skills to do. expectations to expecting much more from them than what we're giving them the skills to do and then the whole country's on fire because these excessive uses of force and i'm like man of course

there are some of these that are not training issues right their character their moral issues on behalf of the officers that that that you know are not the best humans right the same way there are there are corrupt and there are criminal jujitsu teachers, there are bad people in every segment of society, in every demographic, and in every profession, there are terrible doctors, there are terrible police officers, there are terrible jujitsu. They're not, no one's perfect. No population is perfect. So you're going to get those officers who are just shouldn't be police officers, you know, and we'll leave it at that. But the majority are good people who want to do the job the right way. But if they're under-equipped and they underperform as a result of that,

who do we blame? And that's where we sit. Actually, Henner, I remember that video. I think I probably saw it first circulated in an email from you and one of the things that disturbed me about that I recall is that this is one of these cases where you have to reflect on how you have the video in the first place. You've got members of the public videotaping this altercation between a cop and somebody else and the bias, the default bias from the public is that the use of force by the cop is often illegitimate. So in many of these videos, I don't remember in that one in particular, but in many you're seeing people basically, you

know, take the suspect's side of whatever this altercation is and they're shouting at the cop, you know, just leave him alone. But what's not happening in these videos, and what certainly wasn't happening in that one, were members of the public helping the cop. It would have just taken a few other people to help. Granted, in an ideal world, this wouldn't ever be necessary, because the cops would be sufficiently well-trained and in sufficient number to meet any challenge that they're dealing with. But here you have a very clear case

of this thing is escalating to a lethal use of force and it would have been rendered totally unnecessary if you just had a few other people grab an arm and a leg and help the cop de-escalate the situation. Well, I agree a hundred percent. And listen, every single time we see a video that goes viral, you always get, people in the comments will say, why are you filming and not helping? So there is an awareness of that, but we have to understand, Sam, that people can only help in situations where they perceive themselves to be capable of helping, right? Like it's easy for you and me to say, hey, trust me, I walk around the streets looking for an opportunity to help, but it just doesn't

happen around me for one reason or another, but I'm, I'm here. Like if I saw something I'm getting in because I w I would, I would hate for an incident to happen in front of me and to someone to die because I did not intervene. And as a result of my non-intervention, the officer had to escalate a level of force that was probably unnecessary had I otherwise intervened, intervened. Now, to be clear, there are also videos of people intervening, and they're always glorious to see, and we do breakdowns on them, and we highlight them. And I've even asked officers, Sam, I say, guys, if you're having a troubling arrest situation, do you want the assistance of the public?

I've actually asked them this on video, and they publicly said yes. Like, I had 100 cops in the room, and I just did a big video on it one time. I said, yes or no, do you guys want help if the public is there and you're having trouble? Yes. Enthusiastic. Like they want the help. They're regular people. They would rather have help and not have to escalate level of force.

But if they have to do it by themselves and they're outweighed or, you know, someone who's much more athletic than them, or they're exhausted or any number of variables that gives the suspect an advantage there, then they have no choice but to use the level of force necessary to neutralize the threat. And the whole point is we still, I agree that people could help. I agree that people could know not to grab a cop's gun or not to push back when a cop does X, Y, or Z. So there are things we can teach the public. But again, the whole proposition and my whole position in all of this is that may happen over time, but I don't know what the right solution is to get to all of the people of the world. But I do have access to most of the law enforcement organizations and departments in the country. And if we can simply increase their capabilities, we will rapid escalations of force. We will see less amygdala hijacks. And ultimately, cops will eventually, with proper amount of training,

perform at a level that the general public expects them to, Sam. That's the whole key in all of this. Because when expectations are met with reality, or when reality meets expectations and vice versa, nothing is remarkable. Do you understand? That's just the definition of expected. It's just normal. So when a cop takes someone down, ties them up beautifully, maintains them out, twists them into a handcuffing procedure, and then cuffs them and walks them into the car, people look at that and go, that was unremarkable. But what's wild, Sam, is today's day and age, the unremarkable arrests that just happened seamlessly and no problem are remarkable.

Yeah, it's like Batman to the rescue. Yeah, but they're so unusual because the training is so disastrous. So it kind of begs the question of like, man, have cops always been this bad? Why is it such a big deal now, right? Why is this becoming such a big deal now? And I will say with confidence, and cops have verified this kind of off the record with me, is I say, guys, why is the public and the cop law enforcement relationship in America right now as bad as it's ever been?

Worse ever is right now. Why? And they said, and ultimately the conclusion is this, the public visibility of police performance and uses of force has never been so high, right? The public account, opportunity for accountability by the public has never been so high because every incident is recorded with 17 different cameras, dash cam, body cam, security cam, phone cams, three phone cams. So you have all these people filming incidents.

So while public visibility has gone through the roof, police training standards, Sam, remain where they were in the 1970s. They haven't upgraded nationwide. The states have not said, okay, now that the visibility is so much higher, we probably got to brush up our arrest and control skills to 12 hours a year instead of four hours a year in our state. That hasn't happened yet. So we're literally sitting at the crossroads between archaic training practices and new age accountability and visibility opportunities for the public. That disparity between those two things is why there is such disappointment and why there's such uproar from the public. Now, let me just tell you this, change is happening. It's gradual. But the fact that that disappointment

gap is so large and the public outcry is so substantial right now for better policing and reform, we'll call it, of some sort, some defunding, some agree that better training is the way, some just want to cancel police altogether. I mean, you have the full spectrum, right? But where I sit, here's my thing, right? Because at everyone, at the core for everyone is they don't want bad cops. They don't want to give a gun and a badge, Sam, to someone who's going to abuse that power. That's the general, right? People don't mind a good cop, right? And people don't mind even people who are anti-police and want to defund will call the police if they're getting robbed, right? So people want a good officer with good intentions to come do the job and protect and serve and have a high reverence for human life. That's what they want. The challenge is, how do you differentiate between good cops and bad cops? formula that I like to propose as one way that we can arrive towards a better decision on that one key variable that I think every civilian and every police department even would like to

identify. And here's my proposition for that. In order to tell the difference between good cops and bad cops, we have to give all cops sufficient training for the challenges they face. all cops sufficient training for the challenges they face. And then you see which cops adhere to that training and which cops deliberately deviate and abuse their power. That's it. Because Sam, if I were to arrest grandma, let's just say, Henner were to arrest grandma, I had a gun and a badge, Torrance police officer, Henner Gracie, and I'm not a cop for the record, I'm just hypothesizing. If I were to go arrest grandma and Sam, I took her down for a traffic violation and I pull her down, I trip her, throw her on the ground, get on top of her, and I start blasting her with punches in the skull. And you saw a video and you knew my record, you knew my training, and you knew all the backstory of why I took her down. Everything was perfectly clear. And you assess that, you would say, man, Hannah's a freaking bad police officer.

Because for everything that I know about this case and everything I know about him, that was not necessary for him to use that level of force. And it's not like he doesn't have the training to accomplish the objective of neutralizing the threat and taking her into custody with lower level of force. So you would be accurate in your assessment that I was abusing my power. This is the same reason why a black belt in a martial art, right, when they use their martial arts in a street fight, let's say, and they have to, you know, this whole idea of you're a lethal weapon, right? Like you have, because you have lethal training in martial arts, you are judged in a different realm of use of force as a civilian than someone who had no training, right? So my black belt is almost a liability when it comes to use of force because a judge or a jury might say, no, Henner,

because of your training, you didn't need to use that much force in a street fight over a road rage incident. You beat the guy up and you broke both of his arms. Based on your training, we have reason to believe that you should not have used that level of force. It was unnecessary, the level of force that you applied in this street fight that you were in. So the same reason that that's an accurate assessment. Because I have the training, I'm held to a higher standard. And my deviation from that training is a reflection of my character more than my ability to handle or not handle that situation.

So that's my proposition is the whole country needs to be brought up in terms of a reasonable amount of training. So then when deviations happen, we have nothing to blame other than the character of the officer because their training and their muscle memory did give them the quality and the skills necessary to perform and neutralize that situation with a lower level of force than what was captured on that video. Yeah, yeah, no, I fully agree. I mean, there's no argument for the status quo.

I mean, I guess someone must be making a resource argument that they don't have the money, the time, they can't spend the resources required to recruit the right people into the ranks of the police force. I got to think at this point, morale is somewhere near an all-time low in police forces across the country, just given what has happened to public perception since the killing of George Floyd. So it's got to be a very difficult time to recruit good people to the force. Never been harder. Never been harder, Sam. And I have, my best friends are cops. Like I have in every state from all these courses that we've taught and all these

relationships we've made. And I've never heard the eagerness towards retirement that I'm hearing right now. They say, Henner, this is not, it's not worth it anymore. Now you may be aware of what happened in New York recently, right? So the New York, they passed this bill that's kind of like unofficially the diaphragm bill where police officers are, and this was signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, and this was the end of last year. And I fought as hard as I could with all my social media and everything I could to try to resist it, but who am I, right? So it happened. But basically, it says here that never sit, kneel, or stand on the subject's torso.

Never use a chokehold, sorry. Never use a chokehold, neck hold, or headlock on the subject of an arrest. Never sit, kneel, or stand on the subject's torso, including the back, chest, or the abdomen. So they've criminalized this. And now what they've said is that if you do one of these things in New York City, right?

In New York, if you do one of these things, even if it was unintentional and no harm was caused to the suspect in its use, you may be subject to criminal prosecution, personal criminal liability for the officer. So this is probably one of the worst things that ever happened in law enforcement. Now, in this bill, just to be clear, there were things that were proposed that got passed that were good things, more accountability, better reporting, you know, different things, you know, certain use of X, Y, and Z. So there were other kind of logistical things. But when it comes to use of force, and I'll even go so far to say, hey, the removal of

neck restraints, chokeholds, or vascular neck restraints, more accurately described in law enforcement, you know, there's been a lot of debate about taking those out. New York has gotten rid of it. Several other states are doing the same thing. I'm even okay with that, Sam, because a police officer who does not know how to use the neck restraint and they only get trained four hours every two years,

they're probably gonna use it incorrectly. So even though you and I both know that they're very safe and very effective as a method of controlling someone and in lieu of deadly force, right? So in a situation where you might otherwise have to use your weapon, there have been many lives saved when the officer instead opted for a vascular neck restraint that neutralized the threat, and let's say a firearm malfunction.

They used a vascular neck restraint, and the life was saved because of a neck restraint. So there are many more of those cases than the alternative when the suspect ends up dying as a result of a misuse of a neck restraint against the suspect. So, but point is, if you're going to get rid of neck restraints and, or let's just put them at lethal force or get rid of them altogether, fine. But Sam, what they're doing in New York, they've criminalized the mount position, side mount, side control, back mount. These are now criminalized for the officers. So this happened last year. When this got signed into law, the head instructors, the main guys in NYPD who run the defensive tactics contacted me privately, obviously, right?

I'm not going to share any names, but they said, Henner, we fought as hard as we could to keep the mount and the side mount. And they sent me the internal videos showing what they're no longer allowed to do and the number of retirement requests, right? In New York City last year, I think it broke all records. Like for sure, it broke all the trends, but it was astronomical. And I'm getting DM'd and Twitter'd and messaged and emailed from all over New York. People saying, Henner, it's lost over here. It's a lost cause. They've disincentivized us from now controlling suspects, violent criminals. We cannot put the knee on their

torso. We cannot put our hips. We cannot sit in the most gentle, effective ground control positions. And here's what I said. And as this is all public, I said, New York, watch what's going to happen. By criminalizing the least violent ground control positions that have been used for thousands of years in martial arts of all grappling kinds, by criminalizing the least violent control methods, you are now encouraging and incentivizing the use of more violent control tactics. Taser, baton, firearm, punches, closed fist,

blunt object strikes. So these things are now, and there are videos that have happened since this bill has been written into law. Videos have come out, Sam, of arrest situations. And I did a breakdown recently. You may have seen it of this exact dilemma. Now you have four cops trying to control one person by their limbs because they're not allowed to put any contact on the torso and controlling someone by the limbs. Imagine trying to get a little kid who doesn't want to go to bed and trying to drag them by their arm or leg and they're twisting and turning. Now they're violently twisting and turning. You can't just

grab their torso, pick them up and walk them to the bedroom and put them to sleep. Do you understand? So as a result, in this particular video that I'm talking about, the cops start punching the guy excessively. And then the video goes viral because of the excessive punches. But the general public sees that video and they don't realize the reason all those punches were necessary was because the officers were legally prevented from using more gentle mount controls. They wouldn't have required five officers if they knew basic mount. So anyways, New York is pretty much a lost cause in terms of arrest and control tactics. And the police department would agree with this. So this is all, this is city council.

This is like, you know, representatives, right, of the city who have never been in a fight, wear a suit, are not cops, don't know what it's like to hold someone down who doesn't want to be arrested, who are making these laws. And then Mayor de Blasio wrote it into law. And like I said, it's been a downhill slope from there.

And I rest in peace, New York City, you know, and sadly, sadly, the civilians think this is good for them, but it's been a downhill slope from there. And I rest in peace, New York City. And sadly, sadly, the civilians think this is good for them, but it's not. I would much rather an officer... What's that? It's a disaster. I mean, it could not be worse. It could not be worse. It was an accident. It messed up. And now, because New York City's a lost cause, I'm setting my sights on being very vocal about how disastrous and how counterproductive this new bill has become and warning other states that if they engage in this same type of reform, where you just strip officers from these nonviolent control tactics as really a gross overreaction to their aversion to neck restraints, really it kind of all started with neck restraints, right? Oh, neck restraints,

and then things happen and there's videos go viral and they say, okay, let's not do anything, even touch their torso because the diaphragm, they can't breathe as easily when you're laying on their hips. And as a result of that, you know, it's all downhill from there. And it's only going to get worse. It's only going to get worse before it gets better. And in New York, it's going to get way worse. And then eventually they're going to have to undo certain elements of this new law in

order for the police to be able to do their jobs again. But I'm just hoping that more states don't follow suit because you could quickly have a situation where it's way worse than we currently see. So this is literally, and this is my whole point, Sam, is that writing a bill into law that says you cannot use the mount and many other things. But let's just keep it basic because that's part of it. You cannot sit on someone's abdomen in a mount. Writing that bill into law is done by a group of people who mistakenly believe, Sam, that the cops were sufficiently trained in empty hand control tactics to begin with. That's the whole point. If you believed that every one of these cops in New York was trained like

Navy SEALs, and even with that sufficient amount of training, that excessive amount of training, they performed as poorly as they do, it's understandable that you say, let's take away all their ground control skills because clearly they're abusing them. But if you start from the premise that cops get four hours in New York City, it's probably way worse every year or two, if you start from the premise that cops get four hours in New York City, it's probably way worse every year or two, then the starting position has to be, wait a minute, let's give them better training before that we take away their least violent options. Yeah, perhaps we should say something to make this a little clearer to people who are probably no more informed than many of the people who pass this law about the details here. But I

mean, you imagine someone's violently attacking you, right? Somebody who is at least as strong as you are, and your job now is to stop them from overwhelming you or getting away and hurting a member of the public. So you have to figure out how to bring this person under control. This is the situation we're putting cops in. And they have various tools. They have, you know, a gun on their belts. They've got a baton. They've got a taser. And then they've got whatever hand-to-hand skills that they have or have been given. And they've got their own strength and athleticism, such as it might be. And some of these tools are by definition synonymous with death or significant injury, right? The way you bring someone under control by hitting them in the head repeatedly is, as I said before, synonymous with neurological injury, right? If you punch them in the face and knock them out, that is...

And they fall down and they hit their head on the concrete. Exactly. You're not in a ring that is designed for the safety of the contestants. You're on the street. And if you tase them, they rather often, if the taser works, I mean tasers are by no means foolproof, but when it works, this person is also falling to the concrete, not under their own control, and very likely hitting their head, right? risky in terms of the continuum of force and far riskier than any of these things that have been outlawed. And in fact, everything that was just outlawed in New York is practiced in every single jujitsu school on earth every single day ad nauseum. And I'm sure that if you survey- And no death, and nobody dies from this, from this practice, in an under-controlled setting,

when you actually know what you're doing. So I want to ask you, Henner, so the most provocative of these maneuvers is, you know, what we call the rear naked choke or the neck restraint. And so this is when a person grabs someone, reaches around their throat with their arm from behind, and the elbow, the crook of the elbow, is now aligned kind of with the subject's chin, and they are squeezing, as you say, it's somewhat erroneously called a choke.

It's actually a vascular blood restraint. You're cutting off the circulation through the carotid arteries, and after about six seconds or so, the person loses consciousness. How dangerous has that proved to be over the course of, I mean, given what you know, and I mean, you now have tons of experience teaching this. You have how many, I don't know, how many schools affiliated with your school who teach this. There are thousands upon thousands of martial artists training in this, and they all experience both sides of this choke. I'm sure someone somewhere has died,

because someone somewhere has died from virtually everything, but what is your perception of the risk and the variables that govern risk with this move? Listen, you know, like you said, every single day, millions and millions of vascular neck restraints are applied at the, you know, hundreds of thousands of schools around the world that teach jujitsu. Like there's, this is the safety from a statistical point, you know, you could not, I mean, I don't know, 0.00001%. I don't know. It doesn't mean that it hasn't happened of a reported death in practice, right? By someone

who knows what they're doing, who has any degree of training with this, right? This is normally we hear of death when it's used egregiously by someone who doesn't know when to let go or they squeeze a neck restraint, someone passes out, and then you maintain pressure on an unconscious person's body or neck, you maintain additional vascular pressure for, in many cases, what needs to be about 30 to 60 seconds after loss of consciousness is reached. So the amount of pressure and the duration of time that is necessary for someone to die from the use of a vascular neck restraint is substantial. Now, of course, when you consider drug, alcohol use, other medical conditions,

those can play a part. But by and large, the technique has been deemed safe, right? And on all the studies that have taken place and just anecdotally throughout the country and throughout the world in regular practice of martial arts, these are used all the time. So, you know, but I think that pointing back to the New York situation, Sam, and you were kind of alluding to the violence of taser, a baton, right? These blunt force. And that's kind of just for the listeners out there, what you have to understand is that all the techniques that were outlawed are monumentally safer than what is being encouraged now for these officers because they can't do it. And you started with the example that you were kind of painting of a violent criminal, just committed a crime,

wants to flee the scene or wants to assault an officer. Now the officer has the burden of not just neutralizing that person and taking them into custody for their own protection and for the protection of the public. The officer has the burden of doing that without applying any body to body contact on their torso, chest, back, or abdomen.

This is unheard of. There is no way. It literally rules out, if you have someone who's violently resisting, if you imagine all the scenarios where you're able to take them down to the ground and control them so that they can be arrested, and you add to that picture the criterion that you have to do this without hurting them, you have basically ruled that out in virtually every case the moment you make those specific moves illegal. Yes, absolutely. There is no way to do it without hurting them. There is no way to do it without hurting them. There is no way to do it without, exactly. And that's the whole, that's kind of the entire, the confusion here is that they did something, Sam,

hoping to lower the level of force that officers would use on suspects. Not realizing that now, because of the impossible equation you've painted for this officer of having to subdue someone without using their body to do it. They can only use their hands, but a violent criminal cannot be held down by someone's two hands. If you cannot lay on their body, and I'm telling you this as a black belt, lifelong practitioner, if you, Sam, did not want to be taken into custody and someone said, Henner, take Sam and put handcuffs on him right now. But the condition was, I'm not allowed to lay on your body, Sam. I could not put any lay on your body, Sam. I could not put any pressure on your torso, chest, back, or abdomen. Literally, my body could not lay on

your body. If that was the requirement, I do not feel capable of subduing you. And I'm a master. And I'm not saying you like Sam the Blue Belt. I'm talking about Sam the regular civilian, a regular person, just a man or woman who does not want to be taken into custody. I would not be able to do that by myself. I would need four or five other officers to hold one on each limb. And then a third person punching you in the face. So we've literally created a fifth person punching you in the face. We've literally created an impossible equation where a single officer is no longer capable, even if that officer, Sam, is well-trained, even if they had a black belt in jujitsu,

a single officer to take a single suspect into custody who is determined not to go is very, very unlikely to pan out in a way that is both suitable or acceptable to the general public, acceptable to the police force, and acceptable to the civilian in that they hopefully don't have to die while they're getting arrested. But you're forcing the

cop to escalate their level of force unnecessarily because you took away their lowest and most effective control options. It's unbelievable, Sam. It's literally the worst thing I've ever seen from a police training and tactics change across law enforcement, across the whole country. It's the most negative backward step that has ever been taken. Now, again, the rest of the bill had some good things. It's the diaphragm contact aspect that literally throws away all judo techniques, all wrestling controls, all jujitsu standard controls that have been used for thousands of years and effectively and safely to control. Forget the neck restraints. I'm talking about just laying on someone, like two kids wrestling in the backyard

or like, you know what I'm saying? Like we do every single day here in practice. So it's frustrating, it's sad. And like I said, it's such a lost cause and it's so sad for those officers who are now, basically, literally, it was already hard enough. Arresting someone on four hours a year of jujitsu training was already hard enough.

Now saying, hey, not only are you gonna get that minimum four hours, but you're not allowed to touch their torso with any part of your body, or you're going to be criminalized. You're basically saying, either be ready to use lethal force to stop the subject from fleeing the scene, right? Because at the end of the day, you have to arrest the person or simply don't arrest them. Actually, this may be of interest only to martial arts nerds, but perhaps we can say something about why the often touted pain compliance kind of wrist locks are so hard to use when you have a violently resisting opponent. Why can't you just teach a bunch of wrist locks and get past all of this? Sure. Yeah.

Any pain compliance technique requires a healthy neurological processing to take place, right? So the second that someone is either drugged, intoxicated, or high on adrenaline in any way, shape, or form where their pain tolerance, right, as we know, goes through the roof, then a wrist lock simply doesn't have the desired effect. And often instead of pain compliance, you get what's called pain defiance, right? Which is a threshold because imagine if I was like, imagine if I grabbed one of your fingers, Sam, and I started bending it backwards. And I got to a point where it was uncomfortable and your logical brain said, yeah, he's going to keep going. I better listen to him. Imagine if instead of stopping at that point, I just tripled my level of force on your finger. Do you think that your processing

would be, okay, I really better listen now? Or would you suddenly be tricked? Your brain would essentially be flicked into survival, amygdala hijack, and you would literally do anything on the earth to free yourself from that about to be broken limb. You're about to lose a finger or broken joint. And the same is true for a elbow or a shoulder. You can go pain compliance while they're healthily processing the encounter, but the second the person's drugged or alcohol or their pain tolerance simply goes through the roof

because of any one of these outside variables, you simply cannot do it. So my point is what officers need to do is they need to control, body to body control for the first 100 seconds is what we teach. Not knee on the neck, not neck restraint. That would be crazy, right? I'm talking about basic side mount, basic mount control, basic back mount, 100 seconds

to literally slow everything down. And to teach the... Remember UFC 1 when Hoyce fought Art Jimerson, Sam, when he mounted on Art Jimerson and Art, slow everything down. Yeah. And to teach the, remember UFC one, when Hoyce fought Art Jimerson, Sam, when he mounted on Art Jimerson and Art, excuse me, was trying to bump,

twist and push him off and Art could not escape Hoyce's mount. And as a result of several seconds going by where Art could not escape his mount, this is one of his

opponents in UFC one, Art just tapped out. Yeah. Yeah. What happened there? There was no submission. There was no knockout. Why did Art tap out?

Because he couldn't get off his back. And he was trying as hard as he could. And he was ineffective at escaping from a superior supine back mount position. Hoist just laid on him. And at that point, Art was able to process that since he could not get out with all of his might, that it was only going to be downhill from there on out. It wasn't going to go well. It wasn't going to go well. So that right there, Sam, is the number one recommended law enforcement arrest and control strategy. Get the suspect on their back, not on

their belly, on their back, and hold them there for a hundred seconds with body-to-body control. Once the suspect has a chance to process that they're not going to get out at will a whole processing happens in their mind and they go wow i'm not going to get out i can't get a hold of their gun because they have good underhooks and weapon retention i'm not getting this officer off other officers are coming at this point they can kind of go into the process of maybe i should comply and just get this over with but that requires as long as there's hope of escape there is going to be savagery from the suspect. And what I'm saying is to kill the hope, you have to use the 100 second rule and maintain that top

position on a supine suspect until help gets there or until their spirit is sufficiently broken that they will comply with a pain compliance technique or simply verbal commands, which often work once the spirit is broken and they realize that they're really not going to get away. It's a whole different human that you're dealing with. So to answer your question, it's not as easy as it looks. And if you can't control body to body supine for 100 seconds, if that's not legal, there is no guarantee that you're going to get this person into custody off wrist, twist, fingers, joints, shoulders, elbows. Someone will let their arm break and then free themselves from this situation because they're high on some drug. It really is, you know, you have to experience it to understand, but when you have

someone who has much better training than you have in grappling, I mean, again, the mystifying thing is that they don't even have to be bigger than you. They could be smaller than you, but if there's simply a very significant mismatch between how you know how to wrestle based on your apish intuitions and the person who's holding you down, it is like there is something supernatural about it. I mean, it is like your adversary, in this case the cop, is functioning with a different physics. Your attempt to get up is completely hopeless, and only sufficient training can create that kind of disparity. And that is the thing you need to ensure that people get arrested in a way that doesn't require a continual escalation of force. So we've been painting a very unhappy picture here, Henner, but I know there are bright

spots here. Tell me someplace where this is working better than it is in New York. So I've been advocating, I briefly mentioned it earlier, I've been advocating for quite some time now that my prescribed solution to this use of force kind of pandemic in America is one hour of jujitsu every week for every officer in America. Boom, done. Logistically, how do we do that? Where does the money come from? Where do they do it? All secondary concerns. I'm just telling you what it needs to be because I know what one hour a week of jujitsu will create in a regular civilian. I see it all the time. And I know that that's the bare minimum someone needs to be sufficiently trained to get in a violent altercation and be able to just stay afloat and handle their business and not have the amygdala hijack take over.

Right. Like that's to me, that's the key. And of course, that presumes after several months or, you know, six months to a year of one hour a week, someone will be at a place where if they get into a fight, they're going to be able to at least stay focused, stay calm, manage the distance, manage the damage, control the subject, and at the very least until help arrives, which in many cases, all they need to do, right, is for an officer. So that being said, I've been touting this loud enough for long enough that one of our agencies that we've been working with since 2009, Marietta Police Department in Marietta, Georgia, one of these agencies who's a GST certified, so they've had their instructor certified in our week-long certification, but like every other agency we work with, they get cut off when they go home and go to teach it. They're only allowed to teach for four hours a year, right? So Marietta, Georgia has been GST for about 11 years. And two years ago,

almost exactly April 1st, two years ago, what happened was prior to that, a video went viral in Marietta that showcased the officers who again are getting their bare minimum annual training of GST and a few other tactics. These officers aggressively striking a subject on the floor in a restaurant, the video goes viral, right? For all the wrong reasons. And at that point, Marietta command staff ultimately say, hey, listen, we're getting, we get upset at these officers for performing so poorly, but we're not giving them any better options. So it's on us to give them better options. And four hours a year clearly isn't cutting it. Look at the performance and look at this viral video. So that was kind of the tipping point there for them. So what happened? Marietta did something unconventional unexpected unheard of and

revolutionary all at the same time they did a test and I'm going to say his name Major Jake King was kind of the the conductor the man who pulled this whole thing together right the the conductor of the orchestra here in terms of the Marietta transformation and he deserves a lot of credit for taking this risk because he believed in jiuitsu. Here was the test, Sam. They were going to say, okay, let's get rookies because they've heard this. They've heard this proposition of jujitsu regular weekly practice. So they said, let's do it with the rookies. Rookies in their police academy, the new hires, we can pretty much have them do whatever we want. And they have to do it because it's kind of like the guinea pigs, right? So they said, let's do these rookies and let's get them to do jiu-jitsu, mandatory jiu-jitsu

at a local, carefully vetted, civilian-owned jiu-jitsu school where they go to regular classes of jiu-jitsu with civilians in the classes. Let's get them their uniforms and let's mandate that they go. I think it was twice a week was the mandated period for the five months while they're in the police academy. So they did it. They did it. And five months later, these rookies came out of the police academy training weekly. They have their academy all day. They go train jiu-jitsu at night. They have their uniform. They're regular jiu-jitsu students. And not surprising to anyone who does jiu-jitsu,

but seemingly to the shock of everyone else, these officers came out of the academy, these new rookies, brand new cops came out of the academy, and the number one word they used, this is reported to me by Major King, who I've interviewed extensively about what happened in Marietta in terms of the data there. So Major King says,

the number one word on their exit surveys was confidence. These officers left the academy with a greater degree of confidence than ever had happened before in the history of Marietta Police Department. They go into the field, Sam, and they start applying their techniques. And they're taking people down and they're arresting people. And I have, there's actually a video you guys can link to.

It's actually at gracieuniversity.com slash reform. Has all of the Marietta data I'm going to share with you now. And the video showing the use by these officers, their jiu-jitsu skills as rookies. So these guys come out of the academy and girls, and they have these use of force incidents. And Sam, they're taking people down. They're mounting on them. They're patting them on the back. They're verbally saying, hey, you're going to be okay. You know, I got you right here. Let's just, you know, we're going to take care of you. There's no cussing. There's no violence. There's no violent punching in the head. All the things we've gotten used to seeing as a country don't exist with these officers who went through

the jujitsu program in Marietta. Listen, it was so successful, this program for these rookies, that they decided to open it up to in-service officers, Sam. And this is where everything changed. The agency has 145 officers. Of the 1455 95 of the officers opted into the free jujitsu program sponsored and paid for by the agency at the civilian owned school where they're allowed to go train weekly for free to them paid for by the agency as official regular jujitsu students and this went down 95 officers opted in 50 did not. So we have a control group against which we can really compare the performance of the BJJ trained officers and the non-BJJ officers in the agency. And the data is in. It's been 18 months since the program has been initiated

for the department of permitting this type of use. And we have numbers. And these numbers are, right, these are published by Marietta Police Department. And like I said, they're on our website at the URL I gave, and you can link to it. It's unbelievable. So let me just run through some of the key points here. And you can ask questions, and we can dig a little bit on what the implications are for the rest of the country. Because this is the most promising data in the history of law enforcement arrest and control tactics. So training injuries, because of course, the number one concern for a lot of these police departments are, well, how injured would cops get if they're doing jiu-jitsu all the time?

What if they get injured while they're training? In 2,600 classes in the 18-month period by 95 officers, one injury in the dojo, a single injury, a nose got cracked on a takedown attempt, and that was it. And this, remember, be clear, these 95 officers, some of them are young rookies. Many of them are old and out of shape and have never seen the inside of the gym in their lives for the last however many years, and they're now starting jiu-jitsu for the first time. So we're talking about a large population here of officers of all types of demographics and all types of shapes and sizes. Taser deployments reduced by 23% in the population that does jujitsu. So 77% in the non-BJJ group, 54% taser deployments in the BJJ train group, 85% of which were to stop a foot pursuit.

So they aren't using the tasers, right? In all cases, they aren't using the tasers in the fight because they can't handle it. They're using it when someone's running away and they're chasing them and they have to stop the person from fleeing the scene. Use of force injuries to officers. So this is actually in the field now, injuries to officers. In the 18 months prior to the instituting of this program, there were 29 injuries to officers in the field, 18 months prior. In the 18 months after the program, there were 15 injuries to officers in the field. That's a 48% reduction department-wide of officer injuries. Now, here's the kicker, Sam. Zero of the reported injuries were in the BJJ-trained population. Zero.

So 15 injuries in the 50 people that had not done jiu-jitsu, that have not started this program of weekly practice. Sam, this makes the most sense in the world because a fight is a very scary and dangerous thing to someone who does not do this regularly. But to someone who does jiu- regularly. But to someone who does jujitsu weekly, like you or I, getting into a fight,

we might bump our elbow or bruise our knee, but this does not turn into a serious six months off-duty workers' comp claim because I simply, taking someone down and holding them down is what I do every day in practice. And here's what's wild. That's exactly what is being said by these rookies.

One of them took a suspect down. It was actually a mental patient. They showed me the video. It's on our website there. They take down a mental patient, perfect body fold takedown, mount, back mount, patting him on the back, telling him he's going to be okay. When they got up, the sergeant said, hey, you know, to the rookie, hey, that was one of the best takedowns I've ever seen. And the rookie says, oh no, that was nothing. I've done that a hundred times. I've ever seen. And the rookie says, oh no, that was nothing. I've done that a hundred times.

So when these officers are doing this on regular everyday practice, it just makes sense that this is what they do. There's no problem. Now here's what the department loved. The department-wide 48% reduction overall in injuries to officers resulted in $66,752 saved on workman's comp claims that never happened. So the agency saved money and that's $40,000 more than they spent on the training for these

officers in that 18 month period. So the net savings for the agency is over $40,000 The net savings for the agency is over $40,000 because of the workman's comp claims that never happened when cops simply don't get hurt in their uses of force in the field. So then I asked Major King. I said, Major King, there's one more number that I have to hear. What about injuries to suspects? That's what the world wants to know. Okay, the cops are safer, but what about the people that they're taking down and controlling in these positions? When we talk about serious injuries to suspects classified as hospitalization,

if someone did not need to be cleared at a hospital, then they didn't get classified. But hospitalization was well-documented. And when a use of force involved an officer that trained BJJ, the suspect was 53% less likely to sustain serious injury that required hospitalization. Sam, more than twice as likely to get hospitalized if you get arrested by someone who does not do weekly jujitsu. This was the most important number for me. This is the one. If we could reduce the hospitalization by half or really the serious injuries by half countrywide for every officer in America, what kind of service will we be doing? Half, 50% progress. So these are the numbers that I've been dreaming of, Sam, for 25 years. This is it. And I could

never do it because I'm not an officer in charge of a department where I could mandate this type of training. I've been advocating for it for 20 plus years, right? But I could not mandate it. So Major King, having been someone who's been around jujitsu, believes in jujitsu, right? Is on team jujitsu, bit the bullet and said, man, we just got to do this. Let's see what happens with these rookies. It happened. It was so successful. They rolled it out to in-service. It was so successful in-service. We've published this data on our website. And now Major King is being contacted by dozens of police departments every single week from all over the world because people are seeing the data that we've published. And they're asking for his assistance to set up similar programs. And to be clear,

the program that we're advocating for now is a partnership between a private, is a partnership between a private civilian-owned jiu-jitsu, carefully vetted civilian-owned jiu-jitsu school, and a local police department with any number of officers who can send those officers for this supplementary training, weekly training, at the agency. And then the question is, who pays for it? In Marietta, they're using currently asset forfeiture funds, right? Which are federally controlled, but the agency puts in a grant request or a request to the federal government saying, hey, we have these forfeited assets here. Can we use this for training and or equipment? And the answer is yes, you can use forfeited assets for training or equipment.

Okay, we want to use it for this supplementary jujitsu training program. And they permit it. So this is happening at many departments around the country. And now Georgia specifically has approached Major King, who, like I said, orchestrated all of this. And they basically are now talking about state grants funding for departments that want to institute similar programs. So the Georgia Senate is now discussing state grant funding for agencies who want to institute a supplementary jiu-jitsu program. So the Georgia Senate is now discussing state grant funding for agencies who want to institute a supplementary jujitsu program. Literally, Sam, this is the best thing that has ever happened to police training ever, is that they're now contemplating these private partnerships

with local jujitsu schools, right, to make sure these officers get the training that they need, because the agency could never provide this logistically. The only reason why there's a chance that this becomes a nationwide success is because it's profitable for the agency. They're saving over $40,000 in 18 months on this one small 150 officer agency alone. Imagine the much larger agencies, how much they're going to save on workman's comp claims from having their officers better trained. We always knew this. We always hypothesized this.

But now we have the actual, the numbers and the numbers simply don't lie. claims from having their officers better trained. We always knew this. We always hypothesized this. But now we have the actual, the numbers, and the numbers simply don't lie. Well, New York, if you're listening, you've got some of the best jiu-jitsu schools in the country. I guess it's too late to walk back from the brink. You're already over the brink, but you can climb back up the cliff. Henner, is there anything else we haven't covered that you think needs to get into people's heads here? Yeah, I'm so excited. Yeah. I'm glad we did such a good job kind of setting up the current state of why police force is such a difficulty here in America.

And then segwaying into this very promising Marietta case study. And what's wild is as soon as we published the data, we've had, I think to date, we've already had over 50 departments, Sam, contact us looking for, hey, we want to start this partnership. And we just signed two contracts. Roswell Police Department is being finalized this week. We just signed Peachtree City, Georgia. Again, these are actual contracts between the agency, Gracie University Headquarters, and the certified Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Training Center in the region to where they now send their officers and, you know, these officers can go train whenever they want. And it's, like I said, paid for by the agency. The officers love it. And the buy-in, actually, Peachtree City, I was talking to Lieutenant Chris there, and he said,

Henner, we sent out the email announcing our partnership with the certified Jiu-Jitsu Training center there. And I didn't expect the buy-in to be as solid as it was. The yeses, the enthusiastic yeses, it's almost like they're dying of thirst, Sam, these officers. They all know they're under-trained. They all know they're being put in life and death situations every day. On a cop's budget, a lot of them can't afford $200 a month jiu-jitsu classes. on a cop's budget, a lot of them can't afford, you know, $200 a month, jujitsu classes. But the way we worked it out with the agencies is the agency's only paying $10 per officer per class and their invoice at the end of the month. So they only pay for the officers that show up. And on that model, they're always going to save more in, in, in reduced workman's comp claims than they are going to pay for the training. So it will always be a net profit equation

for the agency. And listen, we're not trying to get rich off of these partnerships with the community. I'm just trying to be part of the solution that makes training available at a cost that is acceptable for the city ultimately who's paying for it and the department.

But the challenge we're having right now is we have more inquiries in locations than we have schools to meet the demand that it's a crazy time like so for me like it's just so remarkable that this is even being contemplated that these government departments essentially these institutions of government employees and police officers are being allowed to partner with civilian owned martial arts schools like this never happened. You never had a police department partner with a Taekwondo school, right? So it never happened before. So it just speaks to a jujitsu effectiveness and really remarkable effectiveness in combat, but be a new wave in police training, which has never before even been contemplated before Marietta took the risk and made it happen. So I'm just so excited that we now have the data and that the world can now see that what we've

always believed was true, that a cop is less risk, a police officer. And we didn't even speak about the reduction in lawsuits, right? Because when you have less injuries to suspects, you have a reduction in excessive force allegations and subsequent lawsuits. Those savings have not even been factored into, right? And then of course, the community relations, the community relations nightmare of having a video go viral, where Marietta, for example, used their excessive force in the restaurant on that video that I spoke about, those videos stop happening when cops are well-trained. They don't go viral anymore. And then a department can start to rebuild its relationship with the community because they're at an all-time low right now. And I think ultimately that's all the police want and that's all the community wants

is the community wants to believe in law enforcement and law enforcement wants to perform for the community at a standard that meets their expectation. Yeah. Is there a path for jujitsu schools that have no direct affiliation with the Gracie Academy to get certified in this specific police-appropriate training? I mean, because obviously, you know, there are schools that have slightly different training philosophies. They're more geared towards sport than self-defense. And yet, you know, many of them could very quickly learn and adopt the most effective training here. And that's kind of what's happening. I'm glad you pointed it out because when these

agencies are contacting us from territories where we don't have a Gracie University certified training center, what we do, they say, hey, we want to partner with you, Gracie University. There's no school here. We are now going out and communicating with the jujitsu schools in the community there and saying, hey, who wants to go through the process to become the certified training center that we could then partner with the agency for a potentially lifelong relationship, right? These are not short term.

These are once successful, I expect these partnerships with the agencies to be decade long, if not indefinite. There's no end term to success. Marietta, that never going to stop. They're never going to pull that program because look how much they're saving. Look how many, you know, how the lower level of force, the injuries to officers have gone down substantially. So all the data points to, we're never going to end this, right? And it's not cost efficient for them to do this in the agency. So outsourcing it just makes perfect sense. But the point is, so we're having to go to territories and find schools like you're proposing to say, hey, do you guys want to go

through the process? And the answer is yes. Gracie University certified training centers, it's not an affiliation program like you think of, Sam, in traditional martial arts where, you know, we're your master and, you know, you have to have our banner on your storefront. That's not what a certified training center is. Once you undergo the certification process to teach the courses that would make you a suitable partner for a law enforcement agency, you still can be affiliated with any other organization or any other master instructor. Becoming a certified training center, it just means that we can recommend you because the operating system for the programs that these officers would be exposed to are vetted and monitored and quality controlled by Gracie University headquarters. So the answer is yes, a school can keep their

affiliation and still become a certified Gracie Jiu-Jitsu training center that would make them a suitable partner. And for any jujitsu instructors or people out there who are interested in learning more about that, you can go to gracieinstructor.com. And that's the thing is that, you know, we're having, like I said, we just can't meet the demand right now with how many agencies are coming on board. And it's just a uniquely exciting time for jujitsu, for law enforcement, for the Gracie family who's been kind of fighting for this for 30 years in America. Like we're literally right now at the beginning of a new era in law enforcement training and it's all centered around jujitsu. So jujitsu was already

hot because of the UFC, right? Because it's just this growing sport and it's really effective. To know that the direction American policing is going is towards weekly jujitsu for every officer in America. If you've been hesitant, even if you're a civilian who's been questioning the effectiveness of jujitsu, know that it's the time is now to learn it just as a practitioner. But if you're someone who already does jujitsu, who's on the fence of saying, man, I want to become an instructor potentially, it's the right time to get into the industry. I mean, of course, barring COVID restrictions right now, it's the right time to get into jujitsu because the opportunity to partner with a government institution had never existed, and now it does. And you can learn more about every step that it takes on that process

at gracieinstructor.com. And what's really cool is that we also create the opportunity for someone to reserve a territory for up to 12 months while they undergo the training they need in order to become a certified training center. They can make sure that their territory remains reserved. And that gives them the certainty that while they're moving towards this objective of certification to meet these quality standards, they won't have the territory taken from them because we only allow one certified Gracie Training Center per five mile radius in the country. So if that territory gets taken by someone else, you're pretty much boxed out.

So that's the one thing I would say is that, you know, check out that territory reservation program and all the other details regarding certification. And you don't have to be a black belt. Someone can be a blue belt, follow our systems and be able to teach other beginners, right? Relatively speaking, the art and create an amazing learning opportunity. So blue belts, purple belts, brown belts, black belts, someone who's just getting into jiu-jitsu but fell in love with it and wants to teach it and make their passion their profession, now is the time to join Team Jiu-Jitsu. And we've created a perfect path

with that territory reservation opportunity. And this is what we do. We open schools and we service the community. And now we're partnering with these police departments. So it's never been so exciting and all thanks to Marietta. But it had to get this bad for this change to happen, Sam, because I'll tell you what, law enforcement in America, it's a very slow moving institution, right? The whole idea of law enforcement, they don't want to change anything. So, you know, in that sense, all the negativity, all the things that have gone wrong in terms of just the public outcry, the excessive uses of force, it sucks that it happened. But I'm telling

you, the country is changing. Law enforcement is changing as a result of that outcry. It's fantastic. And we really, as you point out, we're at the bottom of the valley here. I mean, we're literally having this conversation during the Derek Chauvin trial, and I don't know if you feel the same apprehension that I do around the outcome here, but it's easy to see that if some significant justice isn't meted out to him, that the nation could erupt over it, both for understandable reasons and for reasons that are perhaps in part based on the kind of misunderstandings of police conduct and police training that, you know, all the facts aren't in yet. And I certainly wouldn't want

to say anything exculpatory about Chauvin himself at this point, but it's, yeah, I mean, it could be quite dramatic if based on some policy that, you know, as yet unexpressed at trial, we learn that he's not actually going to serve any significant time. Perhaps we'll close on this real world instance here. How do you view the prospects of a resolution to that case? Listen, yeah, I've been asked, and I did a small interview the other day regarding, and they asked me in the realm that I am an expert, right, which is martial arts, and I'm a lot of experience with neck restraints. And the question was posed to me quite simply, is it possible that the knee on the neck

right since that's kind of the central topic of discussion there in the in this thing is it possible that the knee on the neck caused his death right there are many other variables but you know to what extent was that possible and my professional opinion jujitsu found it again i'm not the medical examiner i don't know how much you know how much drugs he had in his body in his system but purely speaking from a jujitsu vascular neck restraint perspective, it is absolutely possible that placing the knee on the neck for the extended period of time that was placed by Mr. Chauvin there could cause enough obstruction to the blood flow to cause someone to lose consciousness.

obstruction to the blood flow to cause someone to lose consciousness. And then the continued pressure after unconsciousness was met could absolutely, like any neck restraint that is held after someone loses consciousness, could lead to someone's death. So I do believe it could have played a part. I don't know what other factors were at play. I don't have all the details. But whether or not he's convicted of that or exonerated for some reason that we don't have all the details, but whether or not, you know, he's convicted of that or exonerated for some reason that we don't yet know, you know, it's yet to be determined. But my belief is that absolutely, you know, knowing what I know and people say, oh, because it's on the back of the neck, it wasn't a neck restraint. It wasn't plugging the carotids. Nope. You can plug the carotid indirectly by placing a knee on the back of someone's neck and the front part of

their neck being so flushly compressed into the ground, into the pavement, which was the case there, that that compression happens indirectly even. And I'm very aware of many techniques, even in jujitsu, where there's a very indirect application of pressure that is still very effective at creating the neck restraint and the loss of consciousness, or the submission in that case, or loss of consciousness if submission isn't achieved or someone doesn't tap out so i absolutely believe that it was possible so we'll see what happens and i agree that there may be a there if he's not convicted that there will be an eruption that may even exceed what we saw previously in all of this so yeah well as always henner thank you for doing what you're doing. You're an inspiration. And one of the things I look forward to getting to the full reboot of civilization after COVID

is the ability to train without concern. So see you on the other side of everyone getting vaccinated. I appreciate it, man. Yeah, definitely looking forward to that. And I appreciate you allowing your platform to be used to shed some light. And if nothing else, I hope what we accomplished today is that the general public can look at this and go, wow, police officers are asked to do more with less than we ever imagined, right? If the general public simply knows how under-trained police officers are, they'll at least second guess themselves before judging an

excessive use of force and know that it wasn't a function of an abusive use of power as much as it was a function of simply under preparation for a very high intense and dangerous situation that these cops are being thrown into every single day. And I think that law enforcement officers, for all they do, I think they deserve that. They deserve the consideration that, look, they're at least not being given the tools. And then that's the bare minimum. And in best case scenario, let's keep chugging along until every police officer is just a regular practitioner of the arts. It just makes sense. If what you do is deal with violent physical altercations every day, you should be an expert in violent physical altercations. Stands to reason. Yeah, well, so needless to say, I consider this a PSA

and we will link to the videos that you recommend. There was one video of a botched arrest in a McDonald's, if I recall, with a suspect in socks. And if ever you want to see the kind of training cops do not have, that's a great instance. So anyway, we'll link to that. And thanks again, Henner. My pleasure.

Thank you, Sam. Have a good one.